Motor Mouth: Environmentalists should be careful what they wish for

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Audi announced very recently that it would stop designing new piston-powered engines in 2026. After that, it would concentrate all its research and development on electric powertrains and, by the early 2030s — at the end of 2032, if you believe Road & Track — would stop producing internal-combustion engines altogether.

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Just two years ago, such an announcement would have had reporters and analysts alike wondering whether CEO Markus Duesmann had been dipping into Timothy Leary’s punch bowl . Today, it’s barely par for the course. Volvo has already announced the same for 2030; Ford claims it will only sell fully electric cars in Europe, also by 2030; and Jaguar, desperate for relevancy, some might posit, says it will be totally battery-powered by 2025. Throw in General Motors’ (sort of) promise to go all EV by 2035, not to mention Honda’s announcement that all its vehicles will be either battery- or fuel-cell-powered by 2040 and I’m sorry, Audi, your announcement was kinda meh.

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Motor Mouth: Environmentalists should be careful what they wish for Back to video

Of much more import to our steadfast march toward electrification, I think, was a little story in Wired about Eriogonum tiehmii . Actually, it wasn’t really a little story. At some 6,000 words — imagine, five times the tedium of this Motor Mouth — about Tiehm buckwheat, it amounted to a thesis regarding what is perhaps the most inconsequential plant on the planet . Its only cause celebre , it seems, is its rarity, as its endemic only to the Silver Peak Range of Nevada.

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More importantly — at least to Wired’s Gregory Barber and botanist Naomi Fraga, on whose expertise he based his piece — the plant’s sole natural habitat, Rhyolite Ridge, is under threat. The ever-increasing need for raw materials to power our cars has come to Esmeralda County, and the sacrifice it demands, says Fraga, is her much-beloved buckwheat.

A familiar plaint, you say? Not quite. In a previous era, Fraga — and anyone else concerned about Eriogonum tiehmii — would probably be squaring off with some faceless oil company, the battle lines clearly drawn, the white and black hats in the confrontation clearly delineated.

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But this time, the mining conglomerate involved — Australia’s Ioneer — is itself a shining beacon of environmentalism, and the mineral it covets is, well, lithium. Yes, that lithium. About 20,000 tons of the stuff, enough, says Wired , to power some 400,000 zero-emission battery-powered cars.  

That the wild buckwheat could be a casualty of environmental corporatism is — despite managing director Bernard Rowe CEO’s promise to “operate thoughtfully” — probably without doubt. Leaching the chemical out of the ground will require as much as 3,500 tonnes of sulphuric acid a day, hardly the kind of treatment conducive, one would think, to the plant’s survival (and guess who has the contract to build the plant for all that acid? Canada’s very own SNC-Lavalin ). On the other hand, lithium, battery-powered EVs, and saving the entire planet from global warming.

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Thus do we come face to face with a vexing problem that will likely become increasingly common as we transform our economy to green power. What was so easy before — taking on the evil that is Big Oil — will probably become ever more internecine as competing tribes in the environmentalist movement find their goals increasingly at odds.

Nor is the dilemma of Rhyolite Ridge the only conundrum likely to see previously aligned forces suddenly on differing sides of the trench. Indeed, the June 12 edition of The Economist dedicated itself to how the green boom could, in it own words, get “bunged up.”

What was so easy before will probably become ever more internecine as competing tribes in the environmentalist movement find their goals increasingly at odds

For instance, according to the International Energy Agency, we’ll need some 40 times the amount of lithium currently being mined if we want to replace every ICE-powered car with an EV. Ditto cobalt; we’ll need 25 times as much of that. So, viewed in isolation, Silver Peak’s ability to power just 400,000 cars might not seem important compared with the 100 million battery-powered vehicles a year we’ll need by 2040. But, if the IEA and The Economis t are right, it’s going to be all (lithium) hands on deck, precious little grains notwithstanding.  

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Nor is this but the tip of the iceberg of conflicting interests as we move toward a carbon-neutral world. Balsa forests are being denuded so that we can build the blades for wind turbines. Seventy per cent of the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, which, as The Economist states, still uses so-called “artisanal” mining that would give blood diamonds a good name. Even solar power — as the National Post recently reported — faces some pretty dramatic recycling issues. And the greenies continue to hate nuclear power plants even more than coal, just as we’re going to need a s#!tload more electricity. Indeed, if modern politics be any bellwether — these days one is likely to face more drama from within your own caucus than from the opposition — these schisms within the green movement might become even more fraught with tension than their attacks on their traditional enemies.

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Nor is this the first time a laser-like focus on carbon emissions has led to unintended consequences. Just as BEVs are today’s answer to regulations, requiring dramatic cuts in tailpipe CO ₂ , so, too, was the diesel engine Europe’s answer to the then-stringent ACEA regulation of carbon dioxide production. And as history tells us, it was precisely that singular focus on reducing CO ₂ that led to Dieselgate’s nitrogen oxides problem.

So, in our rush to barrel down the Tesla highway, could we be making the same mistakes again? Will our laser-like focus on CO ₂ reduction lead to even more unintended consequences? As I said, if the past be any indicator, committing to one technology above all others dramatically raises the possibility of serious side effects, especially if we — as diesel propagandists did before us — choose to ignore what we don’t want to hear.

So, here’s a message to all environmental activists. You’ve been trying for nigh on a decade now to convince all those evil car companies to produce electric vehicles — and only electric vehicles. Well, guess what, they listened. Now what?